community | innovation

Data Science for Better Email

How can you use data science to build better email newsletters, and engage people through their inboxes?

Maybe a better question is: Why should we use data science tools to improve our newsletters?

Well, here’s the problem: most email analytics, are, to put it mildly, not very good. They just don’t give you enough information for you to take action on, to do something specific and concrete to move you toward a goal, whether that’s more subscribers, or more engagement from those subscribers, or a specific ‘conversion goal,’ whether that’s becoming a subscriber or donor, coming to an event, or something else.

As a result, too many of us watch our analytics like they’re the weather: our numbers just happen to us.

The great thing about data science tools? We can start to happen to our numbers.

I recently gave a talk via the ONA Speakers’ Bureau on this topic, and you can see my presentation here: Building An Award Winning Email Newsletter. The talk was about how I used data to build The Magic Pill, an ‘audio newsletter’ that won the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence In Innovation.

And if you’re really into the technical nitty-gritty and want to try out some data science tools yourself, I wrote a step-by-step tutorial on how to use some open source tools here: Lisa Williams’ Email Data Science Tutorial.

Interested in these topics and want to talk? Feel free to find me on Twitter, where I am @lisawilliams, or drop me a note here.